A History of the Wife (37 page)

Preparation for the journey included making “four muslin shirts for George and two suits for the little boy ( Jessie),” as well as “a piece of linen for a wagon cover and some sacks.” Sewing the husband’s shirts, the boy’s suits, and food sacks is not surprising, but the thought of making the top of a covered wagon does give one pause! A few words picture the husband at her side during these preparations: “will spin mostly evenings while my husband reads to me.” Husbands reading

aloud to wives and children is one activity that regularly appears in the records of pioneer families. Kit’s laconic entry suggests an affectionate relationship between the spouses; at least she did not refer to him as “Mr. Belknap,” using the formula that proper middle-class wives employed when mentioning their husbands in letters, diaries, memoirs, and even in their speech.

When the Belknaps set out on their long journey, they traveled with five other families, each with one or two wagons and eight oxen to a wagon. Each wagon no larger than four by ten feet had to contain the entire provisions for a six months’ journey. Kit filled her cloth sacks and wooden boxes (that would later serve as table tops and chests) with flour, cornmeal, “dried apples and peaches, beans, rice, sugar and cof- fee.” Her spirit was decidedly hopeful as she anticipated the use of every possible inch of space. “There is a corner left for the wash-tub and the lunch basket will just fit in the tub. The dishes we want to use will all be in the basket. I am going to start with good earthen dishes and if they get broken have tin ones to take their place. Have made 4 nice little table cloths so am going to live just like I was at home.”

The grueling trip ahead did indeed test Kit’s optimism. Judging from her account and from those left by numerous men and women, no one survived the voyage unscathed. The experience of the death of fellow travelers, often babies and sometimes mothers in childbirth; of infec- tious diseases like typhoid, dysentery, smallpox, and the dreaded cholera; of windstorms and eye-burning dust; of skin infections and broken bones; of thirst and hunger under unforgiving skies; of heart- breaking separations with those who could not keep pace with the oth- ers or died en route—none of these memories could be forgotten.

At one point, when her son was “very sick with Mountain Fever,” Kit Belknap was afraid she would lose her only remaining child. She kept a permanent record of her worst fear: “I thot in the night we would have to leave [the little boy] here and thot if we did I would be likely to stay with him.” Fortunately, daylight brought “fresh courage.”

Continuing on her journey and nursing her sick baby, Kit never mentioned that she was also—once again—pregnant. Being pregnant was a subject few women mentioned in writing; even letters to close family members referred to the subject so euphemistically that today’s reader could easily miss the allusion. Though Kit Belknap’s account of her journey ended on the Trail, we know from other sources that she

and her small family made it to Oregon, where her new baby was born, and where she and her husband raised five children, before he died in 1897 and she in 1913.

The “Notes by the Wayside en Route to Oregon” left by Lydia A. Rudd document the constant presence of sickness and death along the Ore- gon trail. On May 9, 1852, she noted: “We passed a new made grave today dated May 4th, a man from Ohio. We also met a man that was going back; he had buried his wife. She died from the effects of measles.”
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Without his spouse, this unnamed man was apparently too despondent to continue the journey on his own. This was the case of numerous other “go-backs” after the death of a family member along the route.

On June 23, it was a member of Lydia’s caravan who succumbed. “Mr. Giftman died last night about 11 o’clock. He has left a wife with- out any relatives, but there are two fine men that was in company with her husband and brother that will take good care of her.” The young widow would not want for suitors.

Over and over, Lydia Rudd recorded cases of illness, accident, and death. At one point she cried out poignantly, “Sickness and death in the States is hard but it is nothing to be compared with it on the plains.”

The hardships pioneers endured on the trail did not necessarily end when they got to their destination. Elvina Apperson Fellows left a memoir documenting the horrors she suffered as a child bride in early Oregon.
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After her father had died crossing the plains, her mother was left with “nine hungry mouths to fill in addition to her own.” Arriving in Portland, the mother took in washing from the ships at dock and then started a boardinghouse. Difficult as her mother’s lot was, it was nothing compared to her daughter’s in her first marriage, as Mrs. Fel- lows told it in old age:

In 1851 Mother was pretty hard run to earn enough money for us to live on, so when a man named Julius Thomas, a cook in a restaurant, offered to marry me, Mother thought I had better take him, so I did. He was 44 and I was 14.

Back in 1851—that is 70 years ago—we had slavery of Negroes in the South, and we had slavery of wives all over the United States. . . .

What could a girl of 14 do to protect herself from a man of 44, particu- larly if he drank most of the time, as my husband did? I still shudder when I think of the years of my girlhood, when I had to live with that husband. When he was drunk he often wanted to kill me, and he used to beat me until I thought I couldn’t stand it.

One time he came to my mother’s house, where I had taken refuge. I locked the door. He tried to climb in at the window, but I held it down. This enraged him so, he took out his pistol and shot at me. The bullet passed just above my head. The glass fell on me and scared me so I dropped to the floor. He looked in, saw me lying on the floor, and, think- ing he had killed me, put the end of the pistol barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger and I was a widow.

Eventually, at the ripe age of twenty, Elvina met and married a “a fine man,” Edward Fellows, a steamboat engineer, with whom she lived for the next half century.

A WESTERN ROMANCE

One of the most uplifting documents left by a pioneer woman are the journals kept by Mollie Dorsey Sanford between 1857 and 1866 in Nebraska and Colorado.
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She began her journal at the age of eighteen in March 1857, as her family prepared to leave Indianapolis for Nebraska City. It is clear from the start that Mollie was a high-spirited, intelligent, young woman, who had received a decent education and a good Christian upbringing. She stated unequivocally: “We are a happy family,” and, indeed, throughout the next three years with her mother, father, and seven younger siblings, Mollie’s diary portrayed close and congenial family ties.

The family traveled by train from Indianapolis to St. Louis, then by boat to Nebraska. The trip took two weeks, during which Mollie made many acquaintances, including a “charming” young bride on her way to California and a young woman named Libbie whom Mollie was “fasci- nated with.” When Libbie left the boat, Mollie confided to her diary: “She knows I love her. She is actually the most interesting girl I have ever met.” It was not inappropriate for Victorian girls to express strong feelings for each other, to kiss one another, and exchange other tokens of affection.

By summer the family was homesteading in Nebraska on their own farm. This was to be an idyllic period in Mollie’s life. Despite wind and thunder storms and the sparseness of their life, Mollie wrote mainly of glorious sunsets and spacious elm trees and the “bosom of the broad prairie.” And her days were certainly enlivened by the man who was to become her husband.

Mollie had been advised by a friend to “set her cap” for Mr. By San- ford, a newcomer to Nebraska City from Indiana. When she first saw him, on May 5, she wrote in her diary, “I had a glimpse of him as I came out of the store today. A good-looking enough fellow.” Then she added: “I do not know whether I will
ever
love any man well enough to marry him or not. If by the time I am twenty-one, I find a good sensi- ble fellow that won’t talk silly flattery, I may transfer my maiden heart to his keeping.... I so soon tire of the gentlemen, that is, if they get
too
sentimental.”

Their three-year courtship proceeded with an ease that derived equally from their two affable characters and the freer circumstances of frontier society. As Mollie noted on June 29, 1857: “It is refreshing to meet a fellow like him after seeing so many flattering fops. It is won- derful how free and easy people become in this country.” By October 15, when By had become a “hero” with her newly arrived grandparents by helping them after an accident, Mollie mused: “Grandma has taken it into her dear old head that he is my lover, and... I believe he is myself. I knew today when he came, and I had not seen him for so long, that I cared a great deal for him. We girls and he sat in the empty covered wagon until midnight last night talking and singing, and some way he found my hand and held it long and tenderly. No one knew it, unless my telltale face has betrayed me today.”

Four months later, By moved to the level of a stolen kiss. In Mollie’s words: “By has been to see me again. He looks splendidly, and his visit did me so much good. One night while here we went up to Grandpa’s to spend a while. As we walked along the path admiring the starry heavens, he called my attention to a particular star, and as I turned to look, he kissed me on the cheek! It was
dreadfully
impertinent! and I tried to feel offended. He said he ‘knew it was wrong and would take it back,’ but someway, after all, I kept it, to think of, and it burns on my cheek ever since.” However free from external constraints, Victorian courtship had inner ones that ruled out greater physical intimacy.

On March 1, 1858, Mollie received her first written declaration from By, which she confided to her journal. “I no longer stand in doubt. I have had a letter, a
sweet
letter.... By loves me tenderly, truly, and has asked my heart in return, and I know now that I can place my hand in his, and go with him thro life, be the path smooth or stormy. I feel like trusting him, more than any lover I ever had. No doubt or misgiving comes into my heart, and I have told him so. We did not fall madly in love as I had always expected to, but have gradually ‘grown into love.’ I hope that is an evidence that it will be lasting and eternal.”

In June they became officially engaged, but without “definite plans for the future.” By seems to have had a number of different ways of earning his livelihood, ranging from “teaming” to investing in lots. Mol- lie worked for several months as a seamstress under the direction of a married woman in Nebraska City. Always levelheaded, she wrote on June 1, 1859: “I will not marry until I am twenty-one, and by that time, we will be all ready with a home of our own. We will both work for that consummation.”

There is a telling entry for February 15, 1859: “I had my ‘valentine’ from By and two or three from other sources. Sometimes I wish By was a little more demonstrative, a trifle more sentimental. He is very matter- of-fact, and yet I presume if he were, I would soon tire of him.
I know
that he loves me, and that is enough for a sensible girl.” Valentines were already in vogue in England and America, and could be sent not only by acknowledged sweethearts but also by scarcely known acquain- tances as a way of indicating interest.

That spring Mollie opened a little school for twenty pupils aged six to nine, and every Sunday she met her fiancé, noting on May 15: “He is looking splendidly and
I love him more and more
.” Despite the attention of several other men, all with better financial prospects than By, Mollie remained true to her love.

Finally, in 1860, Mollie and By were married. On February 13, she wrote excitedly that By and his brother had gone “to Tecumseh, the county seat, to procure the license, since that legal document is neces- sary in this territory to fasten the nuptial tie.... I baked my own wed- ding cake and everything is prepared for the wedding at 2 o’clock
P
.
M
. tomorrow.” But things did not proceed as she had planned. The account of her wedding day, penned a few days later, tells us a good deal about the uncertainties of life on the frontier.

Our wedding did not pass as quietly as I anticipated. Tuesday morn- ing we were busy with preparations for dinner, receiving and entertain- ing our guests, and it is something to do that in as small quarters as we occupy. We were looking for By every moment, but after 10 o’clock I began to feel nervous. . . . Twelve! One! Two! Three! o’clock came, and no bridegroom. Many jokes were indulged in at my expense. I was fluc- tuating between hope and fear, but never doubting but that he was unavoidably delayed. . . . At three o’clock the folks were about starved and it was decided we ‘eat, drink, and be merry.’ . . . After the dinner was ended and evening approached, I could hardly stand the suspense. I would steal off and weep and pray, and come to the house and smile and be gay.

It wasn’t until nighttime that Mollie heard the horse hoofs of her “truant lover” and hurried her “nearly frozen” sweetheart into the house. Somehow they managed to turn disaster into merriment by donning their wedding clothes in secret and suddenly appearing before their long-suffering guests. Mollie relates the finale with glee.

We came and stood outside the door, ready for the signal from Uncle Milton. Aunt stepped into where the company were, and said, ‘We will not wait for Mr. Sanford any longer. Come out to prayers.’ All marched solemnly into the kitchen. At a signal, the door opened, and stepping in, the ceremony was immediately begun, and Byron N. Sanford and Mary

E. Dorsey were made man and wife together. Such a storm as followed, kisses and exclamations of surprise. Some of the best of the dinner had been preserved, and willing hands soon had a wedding supper with a genuine Bride and Groom at their posts of honor.

And we were married in the kitchen! Start not! ye fairy brides. Beneath your veils and orange blossoms, in some home where wealth and fashion congregate, your vows are no truer, your heart no happier, than was this maiden’s, in the kitchen of a log cabin in the wilderness of Nebraska. Time may change and I may have more attractive sur- roundings, and I may smile at this primitive wedding. I only trust my heart may ever be as brave and true as then and as happy as now.